This image is a portrait of the photographer Walter Naumann on a straw mattress.

Walter Naumann/europeana1914-1918.eu, Antje Kiener, CC-BY-SA

In the Great War, for the first time, some officers and soldiers brought small, hand-held cameras to the battlefields. As official war photographers struggled to capture the massive breadth and scope of the conflict—taking pictures of desolate, ravaged landscapes, tiny figures of the dead and occasional staged “bayonet fixed” scenarios for propaganda purposes—images taken by the troops themselves provide insights into daily life during the conflict, generally outside the battle zones.

While the British did not send their own official war photographers to the Western Front until 1916—and imposed a ban on troop photography in 1915—the Germans and the French permitted their troops to carry cameras as long as they didn’t take photos during battle.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal featured photos taken by four soldiers from France and Germany. Now, WSJ takes a more in-depth look at images from a German dispatch runner in the “Königlich-sächsische 6. Infanterieregiment Nr. 105 ‘König Wilhelm II. von Württemberg” named Walter Naumann, who took part in the battles of Verdun and Cambrai. These images show the camaraderie of a small group, a silent snowscape at Verdun, an altar in ruins, a snatched portrait – scenes that speak to the day to day experience of the soldiers that existed in parallel with the devastating loss of life at the front lines.

Some 400 medium-format negatives from Mr. Naumann —along with diaries, photo albums, leather bags, compasses and binoculars—were submitted to Europeana 1914-18, an online resource that resulted from three years of work by 20 European countries. The project seeks to bring together national archives and contributions from the general public in order to “open up hidden stories of the First World War and show the tragedy that shaped Europe from different sides of the conflict.” Mr. Naumann, a passionate photographer, documented his four years in the war with his Kodak camera, which he got in the U.S. Before the war broke out, he had been planning to emigrate to the U.S. and open a restaurant in Atlantic City, where his father also owned a restaurant. These images, taken in an era when photography was an expensive past-time, provide glimpses of beauty, humanity and warmth amid the devastation—and a fine photographer’s eye.

To explore the legacies of World War I, see The Wall Street Journal’s interactive here.